He’s building his new agenda around an issue that has been in the making for decades: economic inequality. It’s expected to be the major theme of Tuesday’s State of the Union address, and when Capitol Hill doesn’t act on his ideas, he says he’ll use a “pen and phone” strategy to do what he can without Congress.

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POLITICO SOTU 2014 preview

But inequality is, well, kind of a big topic — as Obama himself acknowledges. It would require a gigantic response, cutting across a broad swath of issues, everything from education and tax policy to wages, job skills and even the quality of the jobs themselves.

And it comes at a time when Washington is in no mood for a gigantic response to anything. Right now, lawmakers are just happy that they’re about to fund the government for the rest of the year without a huge fight — a task that used to be considered the bare minimum in their job description. And the bumpy Obamacare rollout hasn’t exactly made anyone more eager to take on big problems.

Economic inequality is “about as big a problem as you can get,” said Keith Hennessey, a former economic adviser to President George W. Bush. And given that description, it’s hard to think of a problem that is more unlikely to be addressed effectively within the current status quo on Capitol Hill.

Really, the theme is so broad that Obama could link it to just about any proposal in his State of the Union address, so liberal policy experts say it’s best just to think of it as a framing device rather than a true policy goal.

“I’ve heard enough State of the Union addresses, and written enough of them, to know that when your means are limited, you try to use framing and rhetoric to make your proposals seem more substantial than they really are. But what else is new?” said Bill Galston, a former domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton.

Obama’s trying not to set people’s expectations too high. In a telling choice of words, he told the New Yorker’s David Remnick that he’ll judge his presidency by whether he “began the process of rebuilding the middle class and the ladders into the middle class, and reversing the trend toward economic bifurcation in this society.” Not whether he actually turns the trend around — just whether he “began the process.”

That said, once Obama raises the subject — even if it’s dressed up in optimistic words like “opportunity” — his record will be judged on how much progress he actually makes against inequality. But even liberal economists who have been hard at work on solutions — and praise Obama for his willingness to take on such a massive problem — aren’t under any illusions that he can make a big dent over the next year, or even in the remainder of his term. It would be hard enough to have a big impact with a cooperative Congress, they say, and he doesn’t have that.

But they’re OK with that. A few nibbles may be all Obama can manage in the next few years, they say, and that’s better than nothing at all.

“It’s just a lost opportunity for a president to propose only things where he can see an immediate return in the next two years,” said Melissa Kearney, director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, who testified Thursday at a Joint Economic Committee hearing on inequality. “This thing has been in the making for four decades.”

It’s not even out of the question that Republicans will join a debate that has largely been pushed onto the national stage by liberals like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, although they’re more likely to define the problem as a lack of upward mobility for the poor — a theme Obama has mentioned as well — and more likely to blame that on the safety net programs themselves, which would put them squarely at odds with Obama and the Democrats.

Even so, the fact that Republicans like Marco Rubio are even acknowledging that inequality is a problem is a big step forward, according to Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the conservative American Action Forum.

“For a long time, conservatives didn’t even want to talk about it. Now at least they’re willing to acknowledge that it is a problem,” Holtz-Eakin said.

The inequality theme is so broad that it’s not always well defined. When Obama and liberal economists talk about it, they usually define it as a shrinking middle class and a growing gap between the rich and everyone else.

That’s a pretty strong echo of de Blasio’s speeches, as he promises to take on what he calls the “Tale of Two Cities.” According to the Center for American Progress, for example, the median family income rose by 35 percent between 1979 and 2007 — right before the recession started — but it shot up by 278 percent for the top 1 percent of earners.

But Hennessey says there could be five different sets of solutions, depending on whether Obama and the Democrats want to reduce inequality by taxing the rich, reducing the gap between the rich and the middle class, improving incomes for the middle class, giving more assistance to the poor, or helping the poor improve their lives.

When Democrats call for reducing economic inequality, “my immediate reaction is, ‘yeah, if you could be more specific,’” Hennessey said.

The exact prescriptions Obama will unveil in the State of the Union address aren’t yet clear, but his “inequality” basket is already pretty full. Among the key provisions: A minimum wage increase, to help workers in the lowest income groups; extended unemployment benefits, to help people who have been sidelined by the weak economy and can’t get back into the workforce; preschool for all 4-year-olds and early learning opportunities for younger children, to give low-income families the benefits wealthier families already have; and measures to make college more affordable, so low and middle-income students don’t get saddled with so much crushing debt.

He’s also hinting to Senate Democrats that he’ll have proposals to improve workforce training, and he’s already talking more about boosting manufacturing, including the high-tech manufacturing hub he announced in North Carolina. That’s a nod to liberal Democrats like Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who has put pressure on Obama to talk more about manufacturing.